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Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
01 Jan 1969-
About: The article was published on 1969-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 2239 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Fundamental ontology & Ontology.
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01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiricism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience of the investigator as discussed by the authors, which is the case in many sciences.
Abstract: One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiricism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience of the investigator. Many sciences develop for a time as exercises in description and empirical generalization. Only later do they acquire reasoned connections within themselves and with other branches of knowledge. Many things were scientifically known of human anatomy and the motions of the planets before they were scientifically explained.
2,510 citations
Cites background from "Ontological Relativity and Other Es..."
...Artificial intelligence research demonstrated in a concrete, empirical form, the long-standing philosophical objections to the tabula rasa (e.g., Hume, 1977/1748; Kant, 1966/1781; Popper, 1972; Quine, 1960,1969)....
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01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: It is argued that humans have a faculty of social cognition, consisting of a rich collection of dedicated, functionally specialized, interrelated modules organized to collectively guide thought and behavior with respect to the evolutionarily recurrent adaptive problems posed by the social world.
Abstract: The human mind is the most complex natural phenomenon humans have yet encountered, and Darwin's gift to those who wish to understand it is a knowledge of the process that created it and gave it its distinctive organization: evolution. Because we know that the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process, we know something vitally illuminating: that, aside from those properties acquired by chance, the mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long-standing adaptive problems humans encountered a s hunter-gatherers. Such a vie w i s uncontroversial to mos t behavioral scientists when applied to topics such as vision or balance. Yet adaptationist approaches to human psychology are considered radical—o r even transparently false—when applie d t o mos t other area s of human thought and action , especially social behavior. Nevertheless, the logic of the adaptationist postion is completely general, and a dispassionate evaluatio n of its implications leads to the expectation that humans should have evolved a constellation of cognitive adaptations to social life. Our ancestors have been members of social groups and engaging in social interactions for millions and probably tens of millions of years. To behave adaptively, they not only needed to construct a spatial map of the objects disclosed to them by their retinas, but a social map of the persons, relationships, motives, interactions, emotions, and intentions that made up their social world. Our view, then, is that humans have a faculty of social cognition, consisting of a rich collection o f dedicated, functionally specialized, interrelated modules (i.e., func tionally isolable subunits, mechanisms, mental organs, etc.), organized to collectively guide thought and behavior with respect to the evolutionarily recurrent adaptive problems posed by the social world. Nonetheless, if such a view has merit, it not only must be argued for on theoretical grounds—however compelling—but also must be substantiated by experimental evidence, as well as by converging lines of empirical support drawn from related fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. The 3
1,922 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth and found a substantial relation between individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and variations in the amount that particular mothers speak to their children.
Abstract: This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substantial relation between individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and variations in the amount that particular mothers speak to their children. The relation between amount of parent speech and vocabulary growth, we argue, reflects parent effects on the child, rather than child-ability effects on the parent or hereditary factors. We also find that gender is an important factor in rate of vocabulary growth. Early childhood is a period of rapid linguistic development. By 2 years, the average child acquires 900 root words (cf. Carey, 1978) and at least a rudimentary syntax (cf. Brown, 1973). Although there has been considerable recent interest in syntactic development, much less attention has been devoted to lexical development. Yet in tracing the development of language from its inception, lexical development must necessarily be a focus of study because the acquisition of words constitutes the child's initial achievement as a language user. A certain amount of vocabulary must be acquired before words can be combined into sentences, and, indeed, several months elapse between the time children start to produce words and the time they start to produce multiword utterances. In addition, vocabulary and syntax are not independent aspects of language knowledge; for example, verbs frequently encode actions involving relations among entities (e.g., give, feed) which are specified by the verb together with its arguments. A major concern in the recent work on syntactic development has been with the relative contributions of the child's innate preparedness for language versus language input. Yet the rapid growth of vocabulary in early childhood also is a manifestation of the human preparedness for language, and parallel questions arise concerning the relative contributions of capacity and input. Especially at the start of language learning, innate preparedness surely plays a role in acquiring word meanings because inferences about meanings are based on pairings of words with situations. As Quine (1969) has persuasively argued, the variety of aspects of a situation which might be encoded by a word is enormous. Because of this, Gleitman and Wanner (1982) point out, it seemscritical to posit innately available constraints on the possible meanings children entertain.
1,635 citations
Cites background from "Ontological Relativity and Other Es..."
...As Quine (1969) has persuasively argued, the variety of aspects of a situation which might be encoded by a word is enormous....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how reflexivity can be operationalized and discuss reflexivity in terms of personal, interpersonal, institutional, pragmatic, emotional, theoretical, epistemological and ontological influences on our research and data analysis processes.
Abstract: While the importance of being reflexive is acknowledged within social science research, the difficulties, practicalities and methods of doing it are rarely addressed. Thus, the implications of current theoretical and philosophical discussions about reflexivity, epistemology and the construction of knowledge for empirical sociological research practice, specifically the analysis of qualitative data, remain underdeveloped. Drawing on our doctoral experiences, we reflect on the possibilities and limits of reflexivity during the interpretive stages of research.We explore how reflexivity can be operationalized and discuss reflexivity in terms of the personal, interpersonal, institutional, pragmatic, emotional, theoretical, epistemological and ontological influences on our research and data analysis processes. We argue that data analysis methods are not just neutral techniques.They reflect, and are imbued with, theoretical, epistemological and ontological assumptions ‐ including conceptions of subjects and subjectivities, and understandings of how knowledge is constructed and produced. In suggesting how epistemological and ontological positionings can be translated into research practice, our article contributes to current debates aiming to bridge the gap between abstract epistemological discussions and the nitty-gritty of research practice.
1,298 citations
Cites background from "Ontological Relativity and Other Es..."
...…(Atkinson, 1992a; Denzin, 1989, 1995; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Hobbs and May, 1993; Lather, 1991) and anthropologists (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1980, 1988; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Rosaldo, 1989) for at least 30 years, and philosophers for much longer (Quine, 1969; Rorty, 1979)....
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...The ‘problem of reflexivity’ and the ways in which ‘our subjectivity becomes entangled in the lives of others’ (Denzin, 1997: 27) are issues which have concerned sociologists (Atkinson, 1992a; Denzin, 1989, 1995; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Hobbs and May, 1993; Lather, 1991) and anthropologists (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1980, 1988; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Rosaldo, 1989) for at least 30 years, and philosophers for much longer (Quine, 1969; Rorty, 1979)....
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Book•
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning as mentioned in this paper is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading.
Abstract: The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading The volume also includeswork related to developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, education, law, and medicine Scholars and students in all these fields and others will find this to be a valuable collection
1,188 citations